The company was called Proctor and Gardner Advertising. But there was only one founder behind it — Barbara Proctor, maiden name Gardner, the first African American woman to own and operate an advertising agency.

Elias M. Stein, a mathematician who pioneered work in a field that was originally devised to describe the vibrations of strings but that proved to have a wide range of applications, including charting the fluctuations of stock markets and gravitational waves, died on Dec.

Dennis Johnson, a composer who in 1959 wrote a trailblazing minimalist work, a six-hour piano meditation of repeated notes and long pauses that went unheard for 50 years before being rediscovered, died Dec. 20 in Morgan Hill, California.

Dr. Sandler devoted decades of her life to documenting, analyzing and stopping the forms of discrimination - subtle and overt - that held women back academically and professionally in educational settings.